Salt Lesson

The tide pulls back its white hem and leaves a scrawl of kelp, each strand a cursive no one taught— the ocean's only draft.

I walked here once with someone whose name the wind has taken. We pressed our feet into the sand and called it permanence, the way all young things do.

Now the rock pools hold their silence like cupped hands full of sky. A hermit crab tests the lip of a shell, decides against it, moves on.

There is a salt that seasons everything— the wood of docks, the fraying nets, the corners of a photograph left open on a table. It is not grief. It is what grief becomes

when you stop flinching: a brightness in the ordinary air, the taste of ocean miles from shore, a kelp-stroke on the sand that says begin again, begin again.